Example: Marvin Olasky’s “Tragedy of American Compassion
,” which argues,
“Americans
in urban areas a century ago faced many of the problems we face today,
and they came up with truly compassionate solutions.”
The Problem: As
with most conservative revisionism, the idea is that before nasty
programs like welfare, the poor did just fine, because private charity
aided them. Many conservatives will argue that the War on Poverty has
done nothing to reduce poverty and instead we should rely on private
charity. But the War on Poverty has
actually done much to eliminate poverty and private charity
could never fill that chasm that would open up if federal poverty programs were eliminated. So how did we get rid of poverty before government? The answer is that there never was a mythical time without government.
As Mike Konczal
writes,
“There
has always been a mixed welfare state made up of private and public
organizations throughout our country’s history. Outdoor relief, or cash
assistance outside of institutions, was an early legal responsibility of
American towns, counties, and parishes from colonial times through the
early nineteenth century.”
Later, Congress
established a pension system for civil war veterans that consumed about
25 percent of all government spending. Rather than “welfare queens”
being a post New-Deal development, some 40 states had programs to
support single mothers in 1920. In fact, far from being an invention of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and liberals, social insurance programs are
staple in civil society. Frederik Pedersen
finds that back in the 10th through 12th centuries, Iceland had an extensive social welfare program. Rome, too,
had a system of public support designed to aid poor children.
Elizabeth Bruenig
notes that
the purely voluntary Church-based social insurance many Christians
adore never existed. Conservatives ignore the fact that the church was
often acting in accord with the state, “You couldn’t just
not tithe;
the Church would get it out of you somehow, and even had specific
statutes related to methods of tithing which fit it into the schema of
secular taxation.” Islamic public assistance was also a hybrid
church-state
institution.
The idea that there has ever been a successful purely voluntary public
assistance program is a conservative myth invented to justify
dismantling anti-poverty programs in the name of a utopian fantasy.
Basically everything about slavery
Example: Recently
convicted felon and
conservative columnist Dinesh D’Souza’s book, “The End of
Racism,” provides some great examples of rewriting race. D’Souza says of
slavery, “No free workers enjoyed a comparable social security system
from birth until death.” Later, he writes, “Masters … encouraged the
family unit which basically remained intact.” In a particularly
appalling passage, he writes, “slavery appears such a relatively mild
business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many
other ever tried to escape.” And concludes, “In summary, the American
slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”
The Problem: Conservatives in the U.S. have a race problem, specifically that many of them believe
that blacks are
“primarily responsible for their own success or failure” and that
government programs only get in the way. And conservative politicians
tend to
racialize welfare programs to
decrease support for them.
To believe that black Americans would have been better off without
government intervention, you have to pretend history doesn’t matter.
As
Marx notes, people, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the living.” There simply is
little mobility for black Americans today because the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and housing segregation still
weighs heavily. A recent study
finds that
counties with higher concentrations of slave ownership in 1870 had
higher levels of poverty and racial inequality in 2000. Further, white
people in these counties
harbor more racial resentment.
That’s
because when slavery permeated society — the legal structure, culture,
science — nothing was left untouched by racism and racial hierarchy. The
conservative “I built this myself” mentality denies that most wealth is
passed from generation to generation, and so is privilege. Erasing the
memory of racial hierarchy allows conservatives and Americans to pretend
that individual effort,
rather than structural racism, is keeping black people down.
So what was slavery really like? Jennifer Hallam
writes,
“Economic benefit almost always outweighed considerations of family
ties for planters, even those who were advocates of long-lasting
relationships between slaves.” Rather than being “relatively mild,”
slavery relied on brutality and violence, the horrors of which are
described in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Bury Me in a Free Land”:
I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood with each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.
I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.
If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.
And,
of course, racism and racial hierarchy didn’t end when slavery was
formally abolished, but rather continued through local policies,
terrorism and violence. This violence was often orchestrated at the
highest levels of government. Consider, for example, the FBI’s
attempts to discredit MLK or the
assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton.
In his response to Phil Robertson’s sentimentalism about the Jim Crow era last year, Ta-Nehisi Coates
cites Freddie Moore:
“The
corpse of 16-year-old Freddie Moore, his face showing signs of a severe
beating, hands bound, remained hanging for at least 24 hours from a
metal girder on the old, hand-cranked swing bridge spanning Bayou
Lafourche. Hanged by the neck the night of Oct. 11, 1933, in a mob
lynching, the black youth had been accused in the death of a neighbor, a
white girl.”
And racial violence didn’t end in the ’30s, but continued until through the ‘
50s, ‘
60s, ‘
70s, ‘
80s and ‘
90s and, well,
two months ago.
U.S. foreign policy
Example: Conservative
foreign policy is dictated by a small cabal of bloodthirsty
conquistadors. These people are called “neo-conservatives.” Some people
claim neoconservatives
have no uniting vision; in fact, the basis of neo-conservativism is a
belief that imperial violence can spread democracy. To maintain this
myth, the long history of imperialism must be re-written. Thus the
official RNC
statement on
the AP controversy laments that “the [AP] Framework excludes discussion
of the U.S. military (no battles, commanders or heroes) …” and
“presents a biased and inaccurate view of many important events in
American history, including American involvement in WWII, and the
development of and victory in the Cold War.”
The Problem: Imperial
violence cannot spread democracy. America’s foreign policy history is
littered with failed attempts to impose our ideas on others — often with
the ulterior motive of stealing resources. As Mark Twain writes, “There
must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that
takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel
with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”
Among the other examples of horrifying and cynical use of American power
conservatives may wish to avoid:
- Reagan supporting the Contras, a fascist junta: Much
of Reagan’s presidency is now hagiography, rather than history. Because
of this, it’s often hard to remember how awful the group that Reagan called “the
moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” truly was. Truth is, the
Nicaraguan Contras were known for their brutality. And where did Reagan
get the money to support the brutes? Why, by selling weapons to Iran.
Yes, the Iran that George W. Bush later called a member of the Axis of
Evil. The International Court of Justice ruled against
the U.S. for violating another country’s sovereignty and laying mines
in Nicaragua’s harbors, but the U.S. ignored the decision.
- Chemical weapons: Before the U.S. joined forces with Assad to fight ISIS, he was public enemy number one for allegedly using chemical
weapons on civilian populations. But the U.S. has used chemical weapons
on a range and scale that Assad could hardly even fathom. During the
Vietnam war, the U.S. dumped between 12 and 18 tons
of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people. At least 1 million Vietnamese
had defects or disabilities caused by U.S. chemical attacks. And those
chemical weapons we judged Saddam Hussein so harshly for using? The U.S.
not only knew the attacks were coming, we gave Hussein intelligence on
strategic sites to attack.
- Screwing up democracy: Sure,
America supports democracy — unless that democracy will do something to
hurt business interests. Among acts that qualify: nationalizing oil fields, raising minimum wages and boosting literacy. In place, we installed brutal, murderous dictators — but only ones that would push through economic “reforms” and play ball when we needed.
- Prolonging the Vietnam War: Richard Nixon intentionally sabotaged
the Paris Peace Accords to undermine Lyndon Johnson’s chances of
winning the Presidency. In the wake of the failure, the war continued
for two long and bloody years, made more horrifying by Nixon’s secret
carpet bombing of Cambodia.
Then there’s the support of genocidal maniacs like
Suharto,
Montt and
Khan. And that’s just the last half century!
Conclusion
English
philosopher Michael Oakeshott defines conservatism as “to prefer the
familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to
mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the
near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient
to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
There was a
time when conservatism was a philosophy concerned primarily with
wrestling with and understanding tradition and the limits of human
reason and ability. However, these days conservatism is reactionary — it
has been imbued with racism, conspiratorial thinking and a
hyper-individualistic capitalism. Instead of questioning the limits of
reason, it has jettisoned it. In its place remains
free market dogma,
bad Biblical interpretation and
a sentimentalized past. In place of reason and argument, most
conservatives rely on fantasy and reminiscence. Allowing conservatives
to redefine the past will be incredibly harmful.
As George Orwell notes, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
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